alt Hacker NewsClaims about agentic workflows are the new version of "works on my machine" and should be treated with skepticism if they cannot be committed to a repository and used by other people.
Maybe parent is a galaxy-brained genius, or.. maybe they are just leaving work early and creating a huge mess for coworkers who now must stay late. Hard to say. But someone who isn't interested in automating/encoding processes for their idiosyncratic workflows is a bad engineer, right? And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.
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> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.
I'll have to vigorously dissent on this notion: we sell our labor to employers - not our souls. Our individual labor, contracts and remuneration are personalized. Our labor. Not some promise to maximize productivity - that's a job for middle and upper management.
Your employer sure as hell won't directly share 8x productivity gains with employees. The best they can offer is a once-off, 3-15% annual bonus (based on your subjective performance, not the aggregate), alternatively, if you have RSU/options, gains on your miniscule ownership fraction.
I'm teaching a course in how to do this to one of my clients this week.
Also, I used this same process to address a bug that is many years old in a very popular library this week. Admittedly, the first solution was a little wordy and required some back and forth, but I was able to get to a clean tested solution with little pain.
It seems to me that the devs that managed to become sergeants of a small platoon of LLM agents to a crushing success deem their setup a competitive advantage and as such will never share it.
But them being humans, they do want to brag about it.
> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.
Who says they aren't interested in sharing? To give a less emotionally charged example: I think my specific use pattern of Git makes me (a bit) more productive. And I'm happy to chew anyone's ear off about it who's willing to listen.
But the willingness and ability of my coworkers to engage in git-related lectures, while greater than zero, is very definitely finite.